Image is of Colombian President Gustavo Petro giving a speech at the UN in 2022.


Trump has arrived in office with the force of an avalanche; ending slowing a genocide on the one hand, while simultaneously promising a total nightmare for minorities and the poor throughout and outside the United States on the other hand. [edited for clarity; I do not actually think Trump has ended the Palestinian genocide obviously, I was making a joke - but the ceasefire is a genuine improvement in conditions for millions of people right now who are on the edge of death, so it cannot be dismissed]

It’s still far too early to truly compare and contrast his imperial strategy with Biden’s, but initial signs show that there does appear to be somewhat of a reorientation. Biden was famous for being two-faced; ostensibly offering aid and stability, while also blowing up your pipeline to ensure you did not actually have an alternative to his idea. Trump, meanwhile, seems only really capable of aggression, threatening several “allied” nations with what may as well be sanctions because of the economic harm they’d do. I suspect we’ll be debating for a long time how much of this can be attributed to the specific characteristics of Trump, or whether he merely embodies the zeitgeist of imperial decline - a wounded empire lashing out with extreme violence to try and convince everybody, including themselves, that they can still be the world imperialist hegemon.

I’ll admit it: I did not believe that Trump would actually try and go ahead with putting tariffs on basically anybody who annoys him. And while the threat could still be empty in regards to countries like China and Canada, Colombia is the first indication of the potential of his strategy. Despite some fiery words from President Petro, after Trump’s administration revealed the punishment if Colombia did not agree, it appears that Colombia will in fact be accepting deported migrants after all. It’s funny how that works.


Last week’s thread is here. The Imperialism Reading Group is here.

Please check out the HexAtlas!

The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.

Israel-Palestine Conflict

If you have evidence of Israeli crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:

UNRWA reports on Israel’s destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.

English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.

English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.

Russia-Ukraine Conflict

Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict

Sources:

Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists’ side.

Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.

Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:

Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.

https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR’s former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR’s forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.

Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:

Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.


  • halfpipe [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    27 days ago

    more than a decade of the US trying to “pivot to Asia” to contain China , and it all ends with the US disembowling itself while China watches and wonders why the fuck they did that.

  • smokeppb [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    24 days ago

    AP - Staffing was ‘not normal’ in the air traffic control tower at Washington’s Reagan National Airport

    That’s according to a report by the Federal Aviation Administration that was obtained by The Associated Press.

    The report says one air traffic controller was working two positions at the time of the crash.

    “The position configuration was not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic,” the report says.

    We already knew it, but now it’s confirmed.

  • Redcuban1959 [any]@hexbear.net
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    27 days ago

    The citrus harvest in California’s Central Valley is “virtually unviable”. The information was reported by NBC Los Angeles, with data from the California Farm Bureau. The measure is due to a lack of workers for the harvest, which is mainly carried out by immigrants, often undocumented. As a result, the price of citrus fruits in much of the country could rise, since California is one of the largest suppliers of fruit in the country.

    • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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      It’s why a mass deportation policy isn’t just horrifically racist and destructive to millions of people, but actively counterproductive to US profitability. it’s why I assume that at some point somebody will step in and say to Trump “we, uh, can’t actually deport all these people, because we need them to slave away for extremely low wages or many businesses will outright collapse.” like, it takes a genocidal white supremacist to lock tens of millions of minorities into systems of exploitation for the purpose of making profit for white people in the wealthy parts of the imperial core; it takes a true idiot to then get rid of all those minorities slaving away for you for mere populist reasons (and then wonder why basic products now cost more money).

      although I also assumed that Trump wouldn’t actually try and do the tariffs because of how idiotic that is for US imperial strategy and yet here we are

      • ziggurter [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        Leave it to Trump to not get the “joke” that deportations are supposed to be a whip in the slave driver’s hand, not an actual slaughter. Dumbass can’t even do the fascist labor camps “right”. He’s gonna get got if he continues like he is. And not by some hero of a lefitst.

  • newmou [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    26 days ago

    With Trump threatening to tariff TSMC chips (if he actually ends up doing that), pausing federal grants and loans, fucking with a fellow NATO member, etc, it honestly seems like he’s just really leaning into the mad man negotiating tactic, which only works if you show you’re genuinely willing and able to take things into new territory. It’s all so outlandishly against the interests of stabilizing US hegemony that it’s the only angle I can think of that he’s working here. Building up MadMan Capital™️ to spend later on his coming hallmark ground war with China

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    21 days ago

    We finally found out what Trump’s demand is in exchange for removing tariffs on Canada. The demand is… Annexation LMAO.

    We pay hundreds of Billions of Dollars to SUBSIDIZE Canada. Why? There is no reason. We don’t need anything they have. We have unlimited Energy, should make our own Cars, and have more Lumber than we can ever use. Without this massive subsidy, Canada ceases to exist as a viable Country. Harsh but true! Therefore, Canada should become our Cherished 51st State. Much lower taxes, and far better military protection for the people of Canada — AND NO TARIFFS!

    Donald Trump Truth Social Post 08:26 AM EST 02/02/25

  • xiaohongshu [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    The Short Case for Nvidia Stock

    This is not a finance article nor is it financial advice despite the title (I do not condone any gambling nor do I hold any positions on Nvidia, just obligatory disclaimer here), but genuinely an excellent breakdown of the DeepSeek “breakthrough”.

    To quote from a summary I read from Twitter:

    • Use 8 bit instead of 32 bit floating point numbers, which gives massive memory savings
    • Compress the key-value indices which eat up much of the VRAM; they get 93% compression ratios
    • Do multi-token prediction instead of single-token prediction which effectively doubles inference speed
    • Mixture of Experts model decomposes a big model into small models that can run on consumer-grade GPUs

    That’s it! There is nothing groundbreaking about DeepSeek. There is no fundamentally new invention here (compared to the original transformer architecture). It’s simply a bunch of Chinese interns looking for shortcuts to bypass the tech sanctions, and stumbled upon a simple yet elegant solution to the problem.

    What is groundbreaking though is that apparently none of the OpenAI engineers getting paid >500k per year managed to come up with a solution like this.

    And this really is an indictment of the entire field of “AI”, the kind of people who are getting paid a fortune, and how overhyped, bloated and unrealistic it is to burn through $500 billion to chase their AGI scam which is never going to work. (The real AGI is as far as you can get from the current iterations of artificial neural networks based architecture, and we barely have any idea what it would look like).

    The question is will it burst the AI bubble? Are we getting another AI winter? Or the US government will find a way around it like it did with all the crypto scam bullshit or the trillion dollar F-35 project?

      • xiaohongshu [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        27 days ago

        The entire AI bubble is just a massive scam lol. Their version of AGI is a pipe dream that will never going to be materialized except for burning through $500 billion waste of GPU hardware.

        However I have been wrong about bitcoin before so I won’t celebrate just yet. The crypto idiots have earned their right to laugh back at me.

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          AGI is a pipe dream but as long as bullshit jobs exist, people will use AI to do them. Those people may get fired but then it’ll be their boss running everything through chatGPT instead.

          That said, probably not worth a trillion dollars, maybe not even worth enough to make a profit. We’ll see how long that pipe dream can keep glorified chatbots going

    • Fishroot [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      Use 8 bit instead of 32 bit floating point numbers, which gives massive memory savings Compress the key-value indices which eat up much of the VRAM; they get 93% compression ratios Do multi-token prediction instead of single-token prediction which effectively doubles inference speed Mixture of Experts model decomposes a big model into small models that can run on consumer-grade GPUs

      This is another case of white people video games weighting 500 gb because no one knows how to optimize their stuff

    • RaisedFistJoker [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      Use 8 bit instead of 32 bit floating point numbers, which gives massive memory savings

      Theres just no fucking way no one thought of this before ahahahahahah what the actual fuck

      • Parzivus [any]@hexbear.net
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        8 bit is kinda impressive honestly. I could see going from 32 bit to 16 bit, but 8 bit requires some confidence that you’re only going to be dealing with fairly small numbers. It’s obviously something the US players should’ve done by now but I have a feeling the coding done by the Chinese to make this work was not insignificant

      • xiaohongshu [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        It’s genuinely funny. To be fair the DeepSeek team used some impressive sleight of hands to make the 8 bit precision floating point mesh well, but the OpenAI people are getting paid 500k a year and couldn’t even think of this. How.

      • NewOldGuard [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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        I’ve spoken to a nvidia engineer before who told me how they have optimized for 8 and even 4 bit fp operations using dedicated hardware and lookup tables for the explicit purpose of ML tasks. So somebody has used this before, just not in this way I suppose

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      There is no fundamentally new invention

      I beg to differ. Finding ways to make do within a resource-constrained environment is the very heart of innovation. Especially compared to throwing a dragon’s hoard amount of money at bigger data centers and more stolen personal data, which had been the style in Silicon Vallay for a time now.

        • nohaybanda [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          No, see, you can’t break relativity or else we’ll all go back in time and suck off our grandfathers. or something, I tend to clock out when sci fi shit is happening

      • xiaohongshu [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        It’s an impressive piece of complex engineering with far reaching applications, don’t get me wrong, and it’s damn impressive to put everything together and get it to work.

        But fundamentally new invention (at least in this particular field) is like when the transformer architecture was introduced that opened up an entirely new generation of neural network architectures and completely changed the field.

        Think of it in terms of basic vs applied research.

      • WhyEssEff [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        27 days ago

        did no one commit to trying even just, like, half-precision??? we need 8 decimal places for training our predictive text model because. because um. because

        • nohaybanda [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          I wrote about this elsewhere on HB, but the reasons for this debacle are structural, it’s not just a matter of crackers cracka-lackin’.

          There are dozens of managers in Meta, OpenAI etc who are getting paid millions - more than DS was worth altogether. This wasn’t (just) a mistake - it’s how corpo hell works. The moment the AI hype cycle revved up all these careerist fucks must have started politicking their way into the next big thing. Why ask for less money and a smaller data center, when this will mean your budget next quarter will be cut? Or means that that fucker Kyle from the country club is gonna get an edge on you come promotion time. Why worry about resource constraints at all when VC and Wall Street are begging you to take their money? The only innovation capitalism breeds is grift.

          • Cimbazarov [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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            Yea management is less than useless and are probably taking up more of the budget than engineers. The more senior the less they matter. They are experts in ass kissing and justifying their bs position so they will likely stay while putting more of the pressure on engineers.

            But not only is the management part of the problem, I think the whole culture of burning through people through hire fast/fire fast is also going to be a problem for Americans to catch up. It works when you have to get a barely functioning slop out, but I don’t think it can produce something truly innovative or optimized.

            I think if America wants to actually compete they have would have to completely dismantle the corporate structure, but I don’t think that will happen. What’s going to happen are these companies are going to get more money than god with little oversight, but it’s not going to work when most of that money is going to the bloat. In my view nothing innovative has come without government intervention (excluding maybe the transistor)

            • ziggurter [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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              For the last five years, all the executives in the company I work for could talk about is “putting AI in that”. It was a “solution” without a problem. And now we do have LLM capabilities added in…which, trust me, are absolutely useless to our platform. But they’re there, so they can be sold.

              Drives me fucking insane. I look forward to seeing how much DeepSeek makes them whine and cry and scramble. I do kinda hope I still have a job afterward, though. limmy-awake

        • very_poggers_gay [they/them]@hexbear.net
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          did no one commit to trying even just, like, half-precision??? we need 8 decimal places for training our predictive text model because. because um.

          yep, i wonder how much of the american industry has been influenced by blind pursuits in model fit/precision scores, no matter how marginal and practically insignificant, because shareholders expect that the “best” model with the best precision is the most profitable. Why not consume consume 50x times as much energy and memory as necessary for a 0.001% gain in one of ten performance metrics if it means doubling your shareholder value?!

          • WhyEssEff [she/her]@hexbear.net
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            my first compsci prof essentially pulled the whole class aside to do a whole “do not, my friends, become addicted to doubles” speech in the data types lecture, and we’re talking programs that were handling, like, at max a hundred kilos of data for that class.

            • Parzivus [any]@hexbear.net
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              Every starting compsci class will tell you that, which makes the whole thing that much funnier. It was probably like one or two people who made the call to use doubles without really thinking about it and here we are

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                to be fair: it is singles, I was referencing the doubles aside as a general “you should be aware of the scope of the data you plan to work with so you aren’t wasteful” lecture.

                to not be fair: you should probably not be using that much depth for predictive text weights when you’re working with petabytes of data, like, be so fucking for real here, did it not occur to you that may be an unnecessary bottleneck kiryu-stare

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          So a lot of people replied talking about commercial AI development, but I think the interesting thing is that even Western university AI research hadn’t really caught up to this. I have a prof who’s been researching ways to get deep learning models to run locally on minimal hardware and was familiar with quantization (although I think he was doing 16 bit), compression, all the tactics I’ve heard DeepSeek was using. I wonder if maybe the thing that makes R1 so much better is the whole COT thing? Maybe no one was trying COT with a much smaller model?

    • RedWizard [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      What is groundbreaking though is that apparently none of the OpenAI engineers getting paid >500k per year managed to come up with a solution like this.

      That’s likely because there is no capital benefit to reducing the size of the model. Sam Alton is the chair of a Nuclear Energy corporation and if the models continue to require more energy with every new release, well, that’s just good for business.

  • xiaohongshu [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    One Republic became the first ever American band to perform on the CCTV New Year’s Gala (春晚), live from the Wuhan stage

    Why? Because during Covid lockdown, frontman Ryan Tedder came out in support of Wuhan amidst waves of anti-China sentiment, livestreaming himself enjoying the Wuhan hot dry noodle, and promised that one day he would visit the city of Wuhan!

    Wuhan hot dry noodle as imagined by Tedder using spaghetti noodles:

    Wuhan (武汉) hot dry noodle tattoo:

    He finally got his wish to perform in front of the entire nation today, straight from Wuhan itself!

    Yes, this is news.

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    Average senate confirmation hearing:

    Democrat: “You’ve been on this person’s show 8 times, he has ties with neo-Nazis.”

    Sen. Norm Respectable (R-MT): “He already had my vote, you didn’t need to convince me more.”